YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

Yeah, I kind of used you to grandstand about a broader point that I hoped other people who had the “yuck” reaction would see, and I still haven’t figured out how to tag people (i.e. the person above) on this janky site

It’s from Maps of Meaning, per the caption, so no this is from his original theory of everything.

Nonetheless, to be perfectly honest, I honestly can’t complain that he put something weird like that in the book as such. What, after all, is actually wrong with it, assuming a certain amount of charity about context relevance? That it’s gross to recount weird sexually charged dreams you had about your grandmother?

For a psychologist in the tradition of Jung, and therefore to a great extent Freud, such material might actually be quite useful! Amongst the worst things therapy culture - and perhaps the whole ideology of post-Freud psychology/iatry/therapy - does is to rehabilitate prudishness about what it is and is not acceptable to talk about in our psychic lives, when liberation from those oppressive norms is precisely the best achievement of those aspects of Freud which remain uncontroversial (not to mention those which are only controversial for bad reasons).

You know the whole thing: “we don’t talk about that wanting to have sex with your mother stuff”, well why on Earth not? Amongst the most obvious things in the world is that people are incredibly weird and complex. Why cave in to propriety and ignore it?

Lots of people have experiences like this, and therefore by definition it’s important to discuss them - non-pathologically - if you want to understand (and improve) people’s psychic life.

I just want to draw special attention to the reasoning here

BigTech, which critically depends on hyper-targeted ads for the lion share of its revenue, is incapable of offering AI model outputs that are plausible given the location / language of the request. The irony.

• request from Ljubljana using Slovenian => white people with high probability

• request from Nairobi using Swahili => black people with high probability

• request from Shenzhen using Mandarin => asian people with high probability

If a specific user is unhappy with the prevailing demographics of the city where they live, give them a few settings to customize their personal output to their heart's content.

Not gonna say anything in particular about that reasoning, just gonna draw attention to it

It’s a horrific tragedy that John Locke should have become America’s (made up) philosopher king after Reconstruction, when Thomas Hobbes was right there

I like some people who have written for Jacobin, sometimes I even enjoy an article here and there, but the magazine as a whole remains utterly unbeaten in the “will walk the length of Manhattan in a “GIANT RUBE” sandwich board for clicks” stakes

Edit: I should here add that “utility” as Hume understands it is not yet the full-fledged utility of “utilitarianism” or “utilons”, which innovation is due to Bentham (only a few decades later). For Hume, “utility” is just what you’d expect from normal language, i.e. “use”, or “usefulness”. The utility of things, including principles, is in their being good or bad for us, i.e. not formally in the sense of a hedonic calculus or the satisfaction of preferences (we don’t “count up” either of these things to get an account of Humean utility).

Hume isn’t an anti-realist! The notorious “is-ought” passage in Treatise which people often take for an expression of anti-realism only goes so far as to point out what it says: that evaluative conclusions cannot logically follow merely from fact premises, so that to conclude “eating grapes is good” we also need some evaluative premise “grapes are good” alongside “grapes are red” and “grapes are edible”, or whatever.

Contemporary accounts of Hume are muddled by his long and undeserved reputation as a thoroughgoing radical sceptic, but his philosophy has two sides: the destructive and the reconstructive, where the latter is perfectly comfortable with drawing all sorts of conclusions so long as they are limited by an awareness of the limits of our powers of judgement.

For morality, Hume finds its source in our “sentiments”, but indeed not totally unlike our friend over there, he does not think that this is cause to think our sentiments don’t have force. Again not unlike our friend, he thinks sentiments may be compared for their “utility”. However, his arguments (a) unlike those of our friend, do not attempt to bridge the essentially logical gap he has merely pointed out, (b) unlike the anti-realist, take reflective judgements about utility to have force, alongside the force of those sentiments we reflect on, of an essentially real character.

Insofar as there is a resemblance, the important distinction between what Hume is doing and what our guy is doing is that Hume doesn’t try to find any master-category (implicitly, “the species” above, although e/accs place this underneath another category “consciousness”) which would ground fact judgements in science to give them force. Rather, (a) he basically asks us what else do you plan on doing, if you don’t intend to prefer good things over bad? (b) identifies the particular sources of goodness and badness in real life, and then evaluates them. By contrast, the e/acc view attempts to argue that whatever our cultural judgements are, then they are good, insofar as they are refined evolutionarily/memetically - Hume thinks culture frequently gets these wrong, frequently gets them right, that culture is a flux, not a progressive development, and he discovers the essential truth in looking at individuals, not at group level “selection” over a set of competing propositions.

Hume isn’t tied to the inherent conservatism of a pseudo-Bayesian model. Curiously enough he is a political conservative, which is arguably what makes it possible for him to (lightly) rest his semi-realist account on what he takes to be a relatively stable human sentimental substrate. But this only gives him further cause to take a genial view of the stakes of what we now call “realism vs anti-realism”: it isn’t as important as trying to be nice.

Too stupid to debunk without resorting to bullying.

If you’re moral realist he’s even more wrong. Of the realist positions available this is closest to naturalism, but it denies the essential precepts of any moral realism viz. the mind-independence of moral truth. This “is-ought” “solution” is as old as Protagoras, “man is the measure of all things”, where “e/acc’s google-brained account of consciousness” stands in for “man”.

As a philosophical position they’re just doing relativism, and then as a historicised political project this is just late 19th century scientism(ific racism). And I emphasise that the premises (“evolutionary fitness”) reveal the sources reveal the political project.

Moral realists introduce an independent condition (mind-independence) which at least purports to save ethical principles from reducing to “might makes right”, this is just the latter window-dressed with talk of “post-selection” to implicitly let in some degree of ethical deliberation as constitutive of morality, making it incidentally also a cowardly way to propagandise racism.

“We have built the torment nexus” but for more literate morons who read Borges

Radioactive Wolf Twinks? My God, what have we done…

yeah well since gawker god knows what people aren’t covering about thiel’s breeding programme

“In 2022, Andreessen [owner of however many multi-multi-million $ properties] and his inveighed against building multi-family housing in their swanky Peninsula hometown of Atherton - average annual income $539,000, median home price $7.9 million - with an email to city government that read: ‘Please IMMEDIATELY REMOVE all multi-family overlay zoning projects from the Housing Element which will be submitted to the state in July. They will MASSIVELY decrease our home values, the quality of life of ourselves and our neighbours and IMMENSELY increase the noise pollution and traffic’

Like there’s already the completely twisted economic logic of housing as a personal investment, propped up by too many governments everywhere who can’t afford to lose votes by pointing out that it’s been nonsensical and unsustainable for decades, but to then add to that the logic of doing it even when you don’t have any genuine perverse incentive to insist on making ROI from the resale value of your house

Just “I’m white as shit and this is what we do when we’re billionaires too”

You know, if you can remotely put aside the less-than-dogwhistling racism for a second